Bio

During the school year, Steven! is a student of computer science,
mathematics, and latte art, and this past summer he interned at
GitHub. Year-round he's a passionate Ruby hacker who loves
contributing to open source projects like Faraday, Rubinius and
Archlinux. He teaches and contributes to KidsRuby, CoderDojo, and
Rails Girls and is also on the core team for RailsBridge. He has spent
more than a few evenings scrabbling to get out of the Bronze League in
StarCraft II. Most importantly, Steven! is a dedicated engineer with a
passion for creating beautiful things.

Abstract

Ruby has a lot of syntax to come to terms with. In an effort to reduce
learning overhead we often restrict what we teach by avoiding serious
coverage of objects in early lessons. Yet objects are what make Ruby
great. Rather than sacrifice Object Oriented Mechanics, Sugar-free
ruby uses a minimum of syntactic sugar to reinforce the
message-passing objective semantics of Ruby until the pupil
understands and then can assimilate new syntactic elements with
greater ease. This talk explores the advantages and pitfalls of the
technique as well as other ways to teach Ruby.

Notes from @myronmarston

Teaching programming is really, really hard.

Programming tkes a lot of self-reflection to teach well.

It's getting better: Hungry Academy, Rails Bridge, etc.

CoderDojo: Kids programming clubs

Game Builder, Scratch, Python, Hackety-Hack / Shoes

Most important lesson: Programming is Fun

RailsBridge: Workshops for Women

Trying to install "Programming is Hard, but it's attainable"

Teaching Ruby: the challenge is finding out why your students want to
learn ruby.